This book is written by an academic, so I was prepared for the line it took. Russia was a backward country 100 years behind the West, saddled with an absolute monarchy, conservative religion and an uneducated peasantry just out of serfdom to feudal landlords. Almost everyone knows this who is interested in Russian history. Then comes the authorial spin doctor with his take on Lenin, Trotsky and the other hoodlums who rose from the swamp to take advantage of the situation. As the author states himself, these Russian intellects barely knew anything about real politics as practiced in the West. They learned everything they knew out of books and untested theories like Marx’s and each others ‘writings’ with which they tried to impress each other. They were going to leapfrog the West to become the most advanced country in the world; it came out rather differently, and Russia is still a backward country in the world’s eyes with yet another despot at the top. It is easy to feel sorry for Russia, even after you see and read about Russian behavior, love of vodka, holding life cheap, violence and corruption.

But the author tries to have it both ways; like all academics he’s very romantic about revolutions, especially when they're far away in space and time: the secret meetings, the murders, the destruction, the barricades, the backstabbing, the millions of dead, he loves all of it. No doubt the Russian peasant got a raw deal, but the solution applied in 1917 was even worse. At the end of the book the author allows that it was unfortunate that it was all for nothing, all of it.. for nothing. Which is something to keep in mind while reading this 900 page history. When the Soviet Union fell in 1990, a protester in Moscow carried a sign, “70 years on the road to nowhere”. If only that had been all, but it was also 70 years of state terrorism and millions sent to labor camps or killed. Rarely in the book does the author mention this. He alludes to Stalin’s future police state but cuts the date of his history book off at 1924. Very convenient for him, because the worst crimes of Communism start soon after that. Nowhere does our erstwhile author talk about whether Communism was right for Russia or indeed for anywhere else, since it always seems to lead to mass killings.

The author, a Briton, also has the usual gripes about America, a 400-year-old tradition with British intellectuals. In America’s only appearance in the book, the author fulminates about the hypocrites in “the Land of the Free” and “in the Land of the Righteous” for not treating the Russian author Maxim Gorky with enough respect. The huge crime? A hotel was unwilling to rent Gorky a room with his unmarried girlfriend in 1905 or thereabouts. He seems more upset about this than the millions of Russian dead in the following Civil War.

Inflamed by socialist propaganda, the Russian peasants burn and destroy farm buildings and smash machines, our author is cheering their righteous anger and calls “militant assertiveness and impatience” the harassing of women in the villages . Even Gorky, initially for revolution, was appalled when he saw the results of revolution roll in. He wrote to a friend that the revolution “was giving birth to real barbarians” and he was not easily shocked. From early on Gorky was plagued by doubts about the methods used by Lenin and others. But Gorky was an artist, a writer, a civilized and refined person born in the 19th century; he could hardly have guessed what wonders of barbarity the 20th century would bring. The author does not have this excuse, yet he gets all cuddly with such reptiles as Lenin, Trotsky and even Stalin. It’s as though Solzhenitsyn had never written The Gulag Archipelago, exposing the Soviet Union to be a vast open-air concentration camp.

Even in the midst of the upheaval of Russia at the dawn of the 20th century Russian authors were bravely writing honest and hard-hitting novels and articles questioning all that was going on. In Savinkov’s novel “The Pale Horse”, the revolutionary was pictured as a crippled personality driven to pathological destruction, amoral violence and cruelty, and the pursuit of power - Lenin in a nutshell. Others condemned the intelligentsia for its failure to cooperate with the state in the construction of a legal order for the pursuit of societal goals, not easy to do with the thick-headed Tsar forever stalling progress, admittedly. But to blindly be in opposition to everything and teach disrespect for law is to court anarchy. Some wrote that to divide people into victims and oppressors in the name of a great love for humanity would also give birth to hatred and a desire for vengeance.

B.A. Kistiakovsky argued that the law was an absolute value, the only real guarantee of freedom, and any attempt to subordinate it to the interests of revolution would end in despotism. All these authors are mentioned in this book, but apparently few listened then to their prophetic warnings, and indeed the author of this book only mentions them in an attempt at equal time, then quickly passes on to the romantic doings of Lenin and the revolutionaries, so dear to his heart. But it was interesting for me to read a recent (2022) piece by this author in The Times (of the UK). It was entitled “Rereading: "Demons" by Fyodor Dostoevsky — a prophetic warning.” “This novel saw the terror that would be unleashed by psychopathic, power-hungry revolutionaries in Russia in 1917, says Orlando Figes”. It’s too bad that Dostoevsky’s warning, although mentioned, gets short shrift in this book. It would have been so apropos. But Figes says that when he first read the book, “it made little sense to me. There were too many Russian names that I could not get my head around.” Then he read recently again and figured out what Dostoevsky was trying to say. But it came too late to change the tone of this book.

At the end of this book, Lenin, who had engineered one of the great mistakes of history, is a cripple due to a stroke. Stalin was moving in to take power already. The author theorizes that Lenin was tortured “by the realization that the single goal on which he had been fixed for the past four decades had now turned out to be a monstrous mistake.” I doubt that Lenin came to this conclusion, but the author may well have.

The book is fairly well-researched, the style of writing is mediocre; this is no “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. It covers a time period in which there was a lot happening, and of necessity has to pick examples rather than the full spectrum of events. The title “A People’s Tragedy” is apropos, but the text forgets to elucidate this tragedy, in favor of the “romance of revolution” until the very end. Then the author is willing to say in a toss off a few mea culpas, “It was a tragedy”. Is the author afraid we won’t read on if we know the full story of this monumental disaster before the ending? The film, “Dr Zhivago” says the same thing in a much shorter time and is more entertaining.

Lastly, the author is constantly contradicting himself, sometimes in the same paragraph. If you disagree with his conclusions, be of good cheer, for he will gladly contradict what he just said a few sentences or paragraphs ahead. Perhaps he had no real viewpoint on the events of the Russian Revolution, perhaps he was worried about his fellow academics, perhaps he just threw in a mass of undigested verbiage in the hopes it would all shake out in the end. Or perhaps, he couldn’t face editing all 900 pages of the manuscript into a coherent text once he’d finished the first draft. HIs take on Lenin constantly shifts, he was in total control, he had almost no control, he was a good guy, he was a bad guy, he was smart, he was deluded. The author may have wanted to tell the truth, but his fear of his fellow academics made him dodge the elephant in the room. This prevarication and evasion turns this book into a pale shadow of real history.